Argon’s Other Eye Part 2 – Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman!

This week, we are intimately examining Kothar. Rubber gloves on! Kothar, in the grand tradition of mighty fantasy heroes with names beginning with a ‘K’ or ‘C’, is a savage wolf of a warrior from the frozen Northlands, Cumberia to be exact; Barrorowrow in Furnernernerness to be even more exact. He is a creation of the great Gardner F. Fox, and a totally original creation, too, or my name isn’t Howard E. Roberts.

Gardner started work in comics (actually, he seems to have started work as a lawyer – I am not honestly sure how he ended up moving from legal practice to writing Superman stories, but there you are) and seems also to have written a fair number of intriguing-sounding works, according to this biog, which my usual hours of painstaking research have somehow managed to tease out of the archive.  Five Kothar books, four Kyrik books (we’ll return to Kyrik later), numerous other sci-fi one/two shotters and number of slightly odd-sounding books in a series called ‘Lady from L.U.S.T’. L.U.S.T., apparently, stands for ‘League of Undercover Spies and Terrorists’ and the books themselves are full of late ‘60s wholesome spy-themed porny goodness, by the looks of things. I am determined to get hold of a copy of ‘The Hot Mahatma’, come what may, but getting back to the subject, this particular part of his oeuvre came about thus.

Gardner was sitting in his office, rubbing his hands up and down his flared nylon slacks and giving his secretary electric shocks, when the phone rang. It was his editor at Belmont books, who said ‘Hey, Fawx! Gimme five t’ousand woids on Koh-nyaaan!’ (that’s how people speak in New York), so Gardner, pausing only to smoke a pipe and have a belt from the bottle of Jameson’s in his desk draw (or possibly munch a handful of goji berries and fire up the mindfulness app on his iPhone for a couple of minutes), got down to it and gave him five thousand goddam words on goddam Conan.

While the result is... kinda derivative (actually, more than kinda – there are several bits that I’m pretty sure have been ‘adapted’ wholesale from Conan stories), Gardner certainly knows how to put together a story, and does it without any mucking about or thesaurus molestation, unlike some other authors I could name. His hero gropes tavern wenches, chops people’s limbs off and goes up against the obligatory sexy sorceress in a series of thrilling adventures, nicely paced and full of blood-soaked, furry-kilted action, and is also kind to his horse.

Kothar does appear on the famous Appendix N list in the original AD&D DMG – the lich in the first story must have been an influence, as others have pointed out, and there are also animated skeletons, healing powders/potions and so on. One main difference is that Kothar cannot keep any of the treasures he (inevitably) wins because of a curse that’s been placed on this sword. Try doing that in your game and expect to be defenestrated by your players at the end of the session. They might be mollified if you gave them the chance to pinch an imaginary waitress’ bottom instead of receiving a king’s ransom in equally imaginary gold coins; probably not, though, unless you’re running a particularly hairy-palmed campaign.

This book is therefore recommended to you – it’s cheesy, fun and doesn’t take long to read. Make sure you skip Donald McIver, Phd’s introduction

The next bumper holiday edition of Argon’s Other Eye will be an ANDREW J. OFFUT SPECIAL!